While this is probably classified as a family film, it really has some fairly dark moments. One of them comes in the very early moments as Flipper and another dolphin are swimming merrily through the ocean and the Bad Guy shoots Flipper’s friend not once, but over and over. You don’t see blood in the water or anything, but there’s no question that he’s hurt. Then he shoots again and again and there should be no question that the other dolphin is dead.

There are certainly some lighter moments in the movie, but there’s also plenty more darkness, like dead fish floating around the toxic waste, and a near-dead Flipper who returns after eating some of the infected fish to boot. So it’s not all fun and games, but there are some of those as well. Just probably not really for the younger set.

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Samara has returned for another go-round at the land of the living, and to try and stir up some trouble in the world above. Unlike the first movie, this one is a bit less frightening, as it’s a little more focused on one person, and there is a bit more idea of what is going on.

This time around, Samara has decided that she wants to live as a real child, and so she tries to take over the body of Aidan (David Dorfman). Unfortunately, his mom sorta likes him, so she fights to keep Samara from doing so. Naturally, no one wants to believe her.

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This is movie is absolutely made by Wanda Sykes. Without her one-liners, it wouldn’t be half as good. And without the five minutes near the end with Elaine Stritch, it would have been even worse. But with those two, it wasn’t bad.

Jennifer Lopez plays Charlie, a perpetually undecisive, dog-walker and doctor’s office receptionist, who meets Kevin (Michael Vartan) several times in a couple of days. Unfortunately, his mother (Jane Fonda) isn’t keen about the idea of her talented son being taken away from her by this woman who is so obviously beneath her.

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Nicole Kidman stars as UN translator Silvia Broome in this political thriller from Sydney Pollack (who also has a smallish role in the film).

Early on, we find out that Silvia has overheard someone speaking an obscure African dialect about murdering a visiting dignitary. Even stranger, that dialect is spoken in her country of origin, a fact pointed out by Sean Penn, playing haunted secret service agent Tobin Keller.

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This film chronicles the struggles of a teenager in Hell’s Kitchen. The neighborhood isn’t a bad setting for a film, or even an uncommon one. Though perhaps not advertised as much, Daredevil was set there, as was Sleepers. What you do with the setting is what matters, and they didn’t do much with this one.

Claude (short for Claudia) is trying to find herself, and her best friend Ellen is helping – until Ellen finds Mark. Mark takes Ellen’s time, and also seems to have a problem with the fact that Claude and Ellen sleep in the same bed, both literally and figuratively. Then things really take a turn for the worse when it seems that Mark may have killed Claude’s new friend, Luke.

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I was really disappointed in this remake of the 1977 low-budget classic from none other than Wes Craven. Everyone said it was great. Everyone lied. It was long. It was slow. It was long and it was slow. It was painful.

For those not familiar with the premise, a family is taking a trip across the desert on their way to California. At the advice of a questionable gas-station attendant, they take a shortcut through the mountains, thinking they will “save hours”. If you’re towing a large trailer, do you really want to take a dirt road, no matter how well maintained it looks, through the mountains, with no one around? Come on. I can take a certain amount of leeway, but that’s just stupid. Some things, yes, but that’s just lame.

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This film is made to bring together a handful of fresh young faces (well, they were fresh at the time), but the story isn’t bad. Though I’m not up on my mob history, the fact that “Lucky” Luciano (Christian Slater) and Meyer Lansky (Patrick Dempsey) reshaped the mafia as it was into the mafia that it became is a pretty interesting one to see.

What’s too bad is that it looks too much like a teeny-bopper movie than a serious flick, so instead of being a competitor to Goodfellas, it’s seen more as a joke. That’s a shame.

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Like Dennis the Menace, this movie won’t win many awards – but it is a pretty decent family flick. The only problem it has in that regard, in fact, is one scatalogical expletive (a fairly funny one, but still).

Beyond that, the plot is simple. Jason Alexander is the manager of a five-star hotel in New York, and his two kids live there with him. They are naturally hard at work trying to make his life miserable and he is hard at work trying to keep the hotel up-to-snuff for its high-falutin’ guests.

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As the poem goes, the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world. Rebecca De Mornay stars as the widow of a doctor who takes his own life after being accused of inappropriately touching his female clients, and she decides that her hand should be the one to rock the cradle of the one who caused her so much pain.

After waiting a few months for things to settle down, she insinuates herself as a nanny to the one who started the whole mess, and at first things go swimmingly. But slowly they start to fall apart. Mentally disabled helper Solomon (played excellently by Ernie Hudson) sees her breast feeding the baby that she is supposed to be watching, and she makes short work of him by planting some evidence to get him kicked out.

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The inimitable Walter Matthau stars as Mr. Wilson in this live-action telling of the classic comic strip tale, and if that’s not enough, comic veteran Christopher Lloyd plays a role as Switchblade Sam, the robber nabbed by Dennis in the film.

Sure, it’s a bit of fluff, but it’s also a good fun film that the family can enjoy. The younger kids will enjoy the physical comedy, while the older kids can enjoy the dialogue and even the adults can get a laugh from the film too, without feeling as if they’re losing brain cells while listening to another rendition of another sappy song for the umpteenth time. It’s a fresh change of pace if you’re in need of something that’s okay for the kids to watch.

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